On Sunday, March 9, just six days after a settlement between Insomnia Cookies and four workers who went on strike last August, the company suspended bicycle delivery “driver” and union organizer Tasia Edmonds. Quick action by the Industrial Workers of the World, which represents Edmonds, the four strikers, and several other area workers, forced the company to reinstate Edmonds. Two dozen IWW members and allies picketed the Boston Insomnia Cookies location, where Edmonds is employed, on Friday, March 14. Organizers planned another rally for Saturday, March 22, after student allies from the abutting Boston University return from Spring Break, but the company capitulated, agreeing on March 20 to bring Edmonds back to work.

Edmonds was disciplined for speaking out against workplace injustices, which the boss called “Insubordination.” According to Edmonds ““I was suspended for my union involvement. I have never been disciplined before. I was not served any paper work detailing why I was suspended. I want to get back to work, and I want back pay for the days I missed.” While Insomnia has reinstated Edmonds, as of press time there is no confirmation that she will receive back pay for time lost during her suspension. The union is prepared to fight to win Edmonds’ lost wages, and to ensure Insomnia Cookies sticks to its promise not to discipline or intimidate workers for union organizing.

The standard of living for US workers has been stagnating or in decline for the last four decades despite enormous leaps in productivity. Labor unions, organizing on the shop floor to shut down production to enforce workers’ demands, are a well-proven and direct method of closing the gap between what workers want and what they get from their bosses. Yet labor unions today count under 8% of private sector workers and under 40% of public sector workers in their membership. Furthermore, public opinion often turns against those workers who risk their jobs and reputations to try and start up unions in their workplaces, calling them undeserving and a host of other insults. Is there anything in the history of unionism that explains why we see these self-defeating and contradictory behaviors playing themselves out at a time when workers need more than ever to come together to fight for common goals?

Looking back a century or earlier to the rise of labor unions as major force in industrialized countries, we see that some of the biggest unions (AFL in particular in the US) made no bones about setting their priorities on organizing and protecting highly trained and socially privileged workers (native-born white males in particular) not only from capitalist factory owners, but also against supposed threats “from below” in the form of immigrant workers; female workers; workers of ethnic, religious and racial minorities, and other relatively underprivileged workers. The arguable goal of these unions was to create a well-paid, elite class of “deserving workers” who were able, as a unified group, to put their needs ahead of other workers’ needs, sometimes aligning their interests with the employing class in the process. When it suited them, these unions would break each others’ strikes and generally do whatever it took to obtain for themselves, as they said, what they considered to be “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” even if it meant hurting other, supposedly less deserving workers along the way.

That is not what we in the IWW would call a broad-spectrum working class solidarity, but a perverse kind of unionism fueled by reaction, racism, sexism, nativism, and other prejudices. Most of all, though, it’s a unionism that doesn’t get to the root of the problem facing all workers, whether or not we inhabit traditionally privileged racial, gender, and other statuses. That is that capitalism, in allowing a 1% to 10% of social members to control, own, and unduly influence industry, thereby directly or indirectly ruling over the other 90% to 99%, creates at a structural or institutional level a permanent underclass of people who have fewer opportunities and greater hardships no matter what they do.

By contrast, the IWW and our similarly radical forebears have fought — even when it was illegal, for instance, for black and white workers to belong to the same unions — to have a totally unified class of working people: skilled and unskilled, male and female, with no one left out. We did this because it is not only just in itself, but also because it is the only strategic or logical method of liberating workers from the capitalists’ domination of modern society. Either we all stand united and on equal footing in opposition to the controllers of industry on the basis of class alone, or we will be divided and conquered from within our ranks and defeated, as has happened over and over again. (The reaction from certain subsets of the white working class against racial equality and integration in the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, was arguably an important part of how the capitalist class was able to regain a strengthened hand after decades of working class organization and upsurges to bring us the overtly anti-worker, neoliberal regimes of Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and so on from the 1980s to today.)

In 2014, more than 60 years after McCarthyism and the institutionalized purging of radicals from within mainstream labor unions, more than 50 years after the near-collapse of the IWW that followed it, and more than 40 years after average US wages reached their high point, labor radicals still struggle to overcome pro-capitalist union ideologies and reverse the class defeats which have plagued workers for far too long. In current IWW organizing campaigns, whether it is around the Sisters’ Camelot Union in Minnesota, the Insomnia Cookies Union in Massachusetts, or any number of other active shop-floor struggles, we IWWs still hear criticism regularly from people who consider themselves to be progressive or otherwise left-of center in comments such as, “I support unions, but not for these people. They work part-time and don’t have job skills!” Or they will tell us, “If you want better wages, get out of the fast food industry and go back to school!” We also hear these sorts of remarks around other contemporary struggles going on in the broader “Fight for 15” movement at McDonald’s and other large, highly profitable franchise chains.

Comments like these betray almost superstitious beliefs not only in an upward social and economic mobility that always had a low ceiling for the majority and no longer, in large measure, even exists, but also in a labor division and class system that is based on the notion that some workers deserve to be treated and paid badly by their employers — and indeed that there should be two separate employing and working classes to begin with (rather than, say, a cooperative system of industry in which this dichotomy is transcended). To IWWs, all workers deserve a union, and we believe that until all workers do organize into One Big Union, we can expect to see continued inequalities between “undeserving” workers (or so it is rationalized) who are stuck with jobs comprised of 90% disempowering tasks and low compensation and “deserving” workers (or so it is rationalized) who get to do the better jobs that carry more prestige and never involve undervalued but necessary “dirty work” like picking up trash, flipping burgers, or changing diapers. But most of all, there will be a capitalist class above both types of workers, keeping most of the fruits of our labor as their own private property and letting us fight amongst ourselves for the leftovers. The IWW exists to end these injustices and form a democratic society in which industry is operated according to need as determined by workers ourselves. Are you with us?

In August, employees of Cambridge, MA’s Insomnia Cookies struck, and joined the IWW. They were fed up with lousy pay and conditions. Their demands included $15/hr, health care, and a union, and they were swiftly terminated. Ever since, workers have stayed strong and maintained their struggle, which has grown into an organizing drive at the boutique cookie business.

Insomnia pays rock-bottom wages, charges $1.35 for cookies that cost the company $.10 to make, and refuses to pay workers’ compensation. Bike delivery workers report that if they get hurt in traffic, the boss’ response is, “Why are you late?” In response to a series of protests against the company’s labor practices, Insomnia falsely reported picketers were blocking the sidewalk in front of the Cambridge store, giving Harvard and Cambridge cops an excuse to bring police violence, and phony charges of assaulting cops, down on a union member.

Undeterred, the workers and their allies are keeping up pressure on the company with continuing pickets of local stores. Students at Harvard, BU and elsewhere have called for a boycott of the company. The National Labor Relations Board issued a Complaint against Insomnia for illegally firing workers for union activity. Recently SEIU Local 509 donated $1,000 to the campaign, a magnificent act of solidarity.

You can help too! Please join Insomnia strikers and their supporters at the Strike & Organizing Campaign Fundraiser, Wednesday January 22, starting at 7 pm, at the Center for Marxist Education, 550 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge (2nd floor), steps from the Central Square MBTA stop. If you can’t come to the event, please consider making a donation to the Insomnia Cookies Workers’ Organizing Fund, which is fueling the union drive.

In August, Insomnia Cookies unlawfully fired 4 workers who went on strike. All four had joined the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World, a labor union). The strikers’ demands included $15/hr, health-care, and that the company not interfere with union organizing. A fifth IWW member was fired last month, after disclosing his union affiliation to his manager.

Insomnia employees were earning sub-minimum wages, some making deliveries on their own bikes until 3 a.m. or later, under pressure to ride unsafely, but after a four month campaign by the IWW, Insomnia workers now have more opportunities to take breaks. The NLRB (National Labor Relations Board, a government agency) has also issued a formal complaint against Insomnia for the illegal firings of the IWW strikers, and has set a hearing date.

However, the company continues to pay below minimum wage and does not provide Workers’ Comp benefits, blaming bike delivery workers if they get hurt in traffic. Let’s expose Insomnia’s union-busting and support fast food workers under attack!

We’ll meet this evening (Friday 12/6), starting at 7 pm, at Insomnia Cookies’ Boston location, 708 Comm Ave (BU East stop on the Green Line’s B Train) to picket the store, and let the community know the truth about the company. A short video featuring Insomnia workers explaining why they went on strike and joined the union is here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o-cMS7gjBA

You can also read more about the campaign for justice at Insomnia Cookies on the Boston IWW’s blog at:http://iwwboston.org/

The NLRB has decided that the four IWW members who went on strike at Insomnia Cookies in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA, were illegally fired. The Board has asked Insomnia to provide back pay to all four strikers and to offer reinstatement to the two who remain in the area. The company has not agreed, so the Board may soon issue a formal complaint against the company. While it’s important not to exaggerate the significance of the NLRB’s potential role in the campaign (workers’ solidarity on the shop floor is always the most critical factor), this is good news for the Insomnia Workers’ Union.

Even more importantly, there are reports from inside stores of improvements to working conditions, and a new attention to providing break time, based on our unrelenting pickets and PR offensive. To all who’ve conducted solidarity actions, sent messages of support and donations, helped w/ phone/email zaps, or come to the picket line here in Boston (including facing down the cops!), our collective efforts are beginning to bear fruit, so thank you and please keep it coming!

Insomnia Cookies fires workers for joining a union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Cambridge police then brutalize IWW members and allies for protesting the illegal firing. Insomnia’s “union problem” just got a whole lot worse.

On November 14, Cambridge police brutally attacked, beat, and arrested an IWW member on a peaceful picket line in front of Insomnia Cookies, Harvard Square. The small picket began at 9:30pm. Police were already at the scene as twenty union activists began marching in a circle, as they have done around ten times since the strike began at Insomnia Cookies on August 18, holding signs, and chanting about bad wages, conditions, and union busting at the late-night corporate cookie chain.

Around 9:45, two police officers attempted to corner and isolate one union member who happened to be leading the chants. As the union member stepped toward safety, police began throwing punches at fellow worker Jason who was standing nearby. Four or five cops jumped on him, beat him to the ground, and continued assaulting him while he cried out in pain for them to stop.

A crowd of stunned onlookers gathered around, many chanted “Shame!” and “Police Brutality!” at the cops. Within minutes, Mount Auburn street was shut down by close to a dozen police cars, vans, and wagons. They carted the fellow worker off to the police station in Kendall square, and attempted to take photographs of all the union members. One cop even threatened the union activists with his pepper spray canister, all for telling him who he was: “Shame!” A shame to the city of Cambridge. A shame on working people. A shame to humanity.

Since the strike began in August, Cambridge police have proven themselves to be real enemies of labor, harassing, lying to, and attempting to disperse Insomnia workers since their very first picket line when they stood as just four strikers who hadn’t even yet joined a union. Then police lied to their faces and told these young workers that they were not allowed to picket in front of their store. The Cambridge cops’ intimidation efforts has escalated with each picket, until on November 14th, when they attacked us without provocation and without hesitation.

The police have failed to scare us away. Every time we come back with more and more workers and allies. The police think they can silence low income workers with their clubs when the company cannot silence us with illegal firings. They are wrong.

Come out, bring as many people as you can, tell everyone you know. We shall not be moved.

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